Penguin Random House will migrate its Signature Reads and Unbound Worlds sites to its company website, which will feature an "enhanced sci-fi category section." The publisher, however, plans to shutter the sites by year's end. PRH's other Web verticals, the children's literature-oriented Brightly and the book discovery-oriented website Read It Forward, will remain unchanged.
"We are increasingly focusing on creating meaningful experiences across all of the digital platforms where we have established strong consumer connections for their book discovery and book buying," a spokesperson from Penguin Random House said in a statement. "We are proud of all of the consumer-facing sites and channels we have created, but the consumer marketing development team who oversees them has made the decision to migrate content and readers from Signature Reads and Unbound Worlds to penguinrandomhouse.com, which will also now feature an enhanced sci-fi category section. With this shift, we will sunset the sites Signature Reads and Unbound Worlds at the end of this year."
Signature Reads, billed as a site whose mission is to "make well-read sense of the world," averaged 1.54 million total visitors per month according to online intelligence tool SimilarWeb, while with Unbound Worlds averaging at roughly 1.36 million. In comparison, Brightly averages 1.55 million viewers a month, while Read It Forward—which hosts giveaways, including through a newsletter with a 550,000-subscriber reach, in addition to its editorial content and newsletter, which reaches roughly 450,000—averages one million total visits per month. (Read It Forward senior editor Abbe Wright was a PW Star Watch 2018 finalist.)
Correction: An earlier version of this article described the number of visits per month to each website as "unique," rather than "total."
